Biomatter Raises $18M Series A to Expand AI Enzyme Design and Testing

Biomatter announced on November 12, 2026, that it had closed an oversubscribed $18 million Series A led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet. The company will use the financing to expand its AI-powered enzyme-design work and commercial operations.

A central part of that expansion is a 2,000-square-meter design-and-testing facility in Vilnius, which Biomatter plans to open in 2027. The site will bring more laboratory building and testing in-house. The round will also grow the commercial team and US presence while funding further development of the computational platform and its underlying enzyme dataset.

Shorter Design-and-Test Cycles

Biomatter says conventional enzyme development takes months or years, compared with weeks for its current programs. The additional laboratory capacity is intended to shorten that cycle to days. The facility therefore connects the company’s computational design work with the experimental testing required to turn candidate enzymes into deliverable products.

“Our goal is to make a custom enzyme as easy to order as a catalog product, including for reactions that don’t have one today,” said Laurynas Karpus, Biomatter’s chief executive and co-founder.

Designing From the Target Reaction

Biomatter’s process starts with the chemistry a customer’s product needs, rather than with a natural enzyme and the data surrounding it. The company says years of generating enzyme data far from natural examples enable its models to make large jumps in sequence and structure. Each design is tested in the laboratory before shipment.

One product example is Biomatter’s collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific on Invitrogen SuperScript V Reverse Transcriptase, an enzyme used to convert RNA into DNA in molecular biology laboratories and mRNA research. Biomatter reports that the work improved oxidation resistance, contributing to reagent stability that supports ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months.

In another program, Biomatter created a methylase enzyme for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM. The company describes SAM as an expensive additive required by every natural methylase and presents the project as a chemical reaction that nature does not perform.

Customer Projects Expand the Dataset

Biomatter reports delivering more than 50 custom enzymes to over 25 enterprise customers across Europe, the United States and Japan. Named customers include AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi and Tereos, spanning biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics, agriculture and industrial biotechnology. Several accounts have progressed from one project to multi-year, multi-enzyme programs, and roughly half of the company’s customers are based in the United States.

Each program adds experimentally characterized enzymes to Biomatter’s proprietary dataset, which the company says makes subsequent programs faster and more accurate. That gives the new laboratory and commercial expansion a shared role: customer projects generate experimental data, while added testing capacity can support further design work.

Astanor partner Harry Briggs said the investment case rested on Biomatter’s data generation beyond natural examples and its repeat customer projects across industries. His rationale ties the technical platform to evidence of commercial adoption rather than treating customer revenue and data development as separate activities.

The financing consequently makes laboratory throughput central to Biomatter’s next stage. Its planned facility leaves a specific operational question: whether more in-house testing can shorten development cycles while supporting the custom, laboratory-validated work behind the company’s expanding customer programs.